Daisy Lampkin of Pittsburgh

I am pleased to introduce the subject of my next and current project. Daisy Lampkin of Pittsburgh was a leading suffrage and civil rights activist throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century. But she was so much more than that.

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1883, Daisy Elizabeth Adams spent most of her youth and adolescence in Reading, Pennsylvania, after her parents separated. She moved to Pittsburgh in 1909, and met a young chauffer originally from Rome, Georgia, William Lampkin. The pair married in 1912, by which time Daisy’s political career had already started.

She began in western Pennsylvania’s lively and interracial suffrage movement, organizing and fundraising on street corners and in household parlors. These activities came naturally to Daisy who had already won prizes for oratory in church and school. Her success in these endeavors vaulted her to leadership positions and she became president of the local chapter of the Lucy Stone League. It would set a pattern of leadership that marked the rest of Daisy Lampkin’s life.

Daisy’s notoriety in the suffrage movement brought her to the attention of western Pennsylvania Republican party leadership. She would meet with President Coolidge, and appointed an alternate delegate to both the 1924 and 1928 GOP nominating conventions, the first African American woman so honored. She would switch her political allegiances after 1932, becoming an ardent New Dealer, but she never lost her political independence. She campaigned for Ike in 1952 and 1956 when she found Adlai Stevenson overly solicitous of segregationist southern Democrats.

In the early 1930s she would begin her most significant work, as an organizer for the NAACP. Beginning with the revitalization of the local chapter, and single-handedly organizing the NAACP’s 1931 convention in Pittsburgh, Daisy would rise to first regional, and then national leadership positions. She served as national field secretary for much of the later 1930s and throughout WWII. This made her substantially responsible for the organization’s most significant membership gains in its early history, helping to backstop the association’s political power as it undertook the legal strategy that culminated in the 1954 Brown decision. Daisy would be the first woman to serve on the NAACP’s executive board.

Along the way she worked with Mary McLeod Bethune from the 1920s on, first in the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and then helping to found with Bethune in 1935 the influential National Council of Negro Women. She was head of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Urban League from the 1920s onward, and was a lifelong and active member of Grace Presbyterian Church in her neighborhood, Pittsburgh’s segregated Hill District. Daisy would be active in Delta Sigma Theta, and after the war would help found the Pittsburgh chapter of The Links.

But all of this is perhaps at most half of her influence. In the 1910s or early 20s, a struggling Pittsburgh Courier ran a subscription contest, the winner to receive a new car. Naturally, Daisy won the contest, but the Courier did not have the car. They offered shares instead, beginning another lifelong association. By the 1930s she was a majority shareowner and vice-president of publicity for the Courier. Her role as editor, writer, and mentor to a host of young reporters is yet unknown.

Daisy’s house on Webster Ave., which still stands in the Hill (graced with the first state historical marker Pennsylvania has bestowed on an African American woman), was once the scene of endless and lively parties, bridge tournaments, receptions, and dinners. Daisy and her husband, William, a staunch supporter of his wife’s activities, were the great hosts on the Hill, and their home was frequented by the luminaries of Pittsburgh’s rich Black cultural life, from Lena Horne to Robert and Jesse Vann of the Courier to Thurgood Marshall (whom legend has it was invited into the NAACP by Daisy.) She was a mentor to Ella Baker, young reporters and activists for the Courier and in countless activist organizations, and K. Leroy Irvis, the legendary Pennsylvania state legislator. She was an ally of Bethune, Walter White, and Roy Wilkens. She shared stages with Joe Louis, Benjamin Davis, and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others.

Daisy Lampkin is widely praised but not well known. Aside from a few articles and dictionary entries, and two abortive attempts at biography, no sustained research into her life, her extensive travels, her rousing oratory, her writing, or her political strategies, has ever been undertaken, to say nothing of her role in the pulsing, dynamic social and cultural life of the Hill. I invite readers to join me on this journey as we recover and contextualize the details of this most extraordinary American woman.

​Readers with relevant perspectives on Daisy and William Lampkin—research ideas, personal connections and stories, or other pertinent ideas—are warmly invited to contact me.
 
Further reading: Mark Whitaker, Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance (Simon & Schuster, 2018).